Anya's Garden Perfumes + The Natural Perfumery Institute

  A Banana-scented flower for Delight by  Anya McCoy  |  May 11, 2014  |  Anya's Garden Perfumes ,  natural perfumery course ,  raw materials of perfumery ,  study perfumery  |  0 comments Michelia figo – banana-scented flowers A BANANA-scented flower! The Michelias are a beautiful group of magnolias. Of course, there’s the M. champaca, with glorious golden/orange fragrant flowers, known as the Joy Perfume tree, and M. alba, whose white flowers smell of fruit and sweetness, and I also love M. figo, with smaller, banana-scented flowers! I had this beauty transplanted from a spot in the front garden where it wasn’t thriving. It’s been in my back garden “plant hospital” for several months and is now blooming like crazy. Lots of fun! I don’t tincture this one, because I use tinctured freeze-dried bananas for that purpose. Don’t you just love it? You can grow this in a big pot, Northerners, and move it indoors in the winter. All sorts of...

The aglaia tree in the front garden is in full bloom, the mimosa, too!  Yet, my heart is pulled to the shady area on the back fence, where my vanilla vine is budding out.  Probably due to the warm winter, the vine, which rambles in and out amongst three varieties of jasmines, is full of buds.  I've never seen so many on it, and I've had it 24 years!  I may succumb to the fantasy that I'll be able to pollinate the buds when they open.  There's a very specific way to bend a small paintbrush to reach inside.  I think it's angled to 40 degrees, and I'll have to check the specifics.  There is a moth that pollinates it in Madagascar and other regions where it's grown commercially, an I don't think that moth lives here in Miami.  I've also read how laborious it is to properly age and develop the vanillin in the beans once they are harvested.  DON'T look to eHow for any advice!  Mercy, how wrong they are on everything.  There are severa...

Green bananas just two days ago - ripened into the lovely fruits, below I'd love to share a wonderful resource with you.  This is for all who live in warm climates and who love to grow their own.  I just harvested some rare small bananas from my garden today (unknown variety) and received an email query from a Guild member, asking for an ID on a sour orange someone had given her.  She intends to macerate the skin in some fixed oil.  I sent her the link with a joke - more info than you ever need to know! Yummy hand of organic small bananas harvested  today, Dec. 27, 2011 in Miami  - some missing because the cook had dibs. In 1977/78, as I was in my senior year at the University of California, Riverside, one of the world's great think tanks, I asked my major professor, Dr. Gene Anderson, if I could obtain a change of major from anthropology (ethnobotany), which I was working on under him, to economic botany, since I felt closely aligned with...